20th Century Fox Television, the animation powerhouse that brought “Family Guy” back from the dead five years ago, has done it again: Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s brilliantly subversive animated sci-fi comedy “Futurama” will return to production on 26 new half-hour episodes more than six years after the series aired its last original episode.

Oh man, oh baby, oh man oh man! I am so happy about this! Futurama is one of the greatest television shows ever, and if you disagree, you’re wrong. Written by math and science dorks, it lampoons science fiction at the same time it betrays its love for it. The Star Trek episode with Melllvar is hands-down one of the funniest things ever written, and if the one with Fry’s dog doesn’t choke you up you’re not human (not that there’s anything wrong with being from Omicron Persei 8).

Yay! So now it’s just the long, long wait until mid-2010 for the new episodes to be released. But you will wait. YOU WILL WAIT.

The movies weren’t quite up to the standard of seasons 3 and 4, I hope the new season doesn’t go the way of Family Guy and stretch the premise far too thin. Admittedly Futurama is a far better premise with better writers and a whole universe (literally) of ideas to explore. So I’m excited for the release, but hope it doesn’t go the way of Family Guy or The Simpsons.

And so I come to your blog just now, expecting to see something about Mercury, or Jenni McCarthy, and…

Mercury? I don’t recall the BA posting anything about the planet Mercury since the last MESSENGER fly-by earlier this year … Wouldn’t mind some more Mercury items here.

Actually, I’m starting to expect more Oprah Woo-frey posts here, been a lot of them lately. Mind you I’d much rather hear about other people and things. Lets hope Oprah has now “jumped the shark” and will fade into merited oblivion even for those silly enough to credit her with, well whatever credit she gets for presenting a popular day time TV show that spouts drivel.

Why is it Op Woo gets “celebrity” renown and not the Futurama writers? I know which show I’d rather get my medical and scientific advice from*! I love that when they needed a star 1,000 l.y. away they actually went and found Omicron Persi.

I don’t recall the BA posting anything about the planet Mercury since the last MESSENGER fly-by earlier this year …

Hmmm … Okay I should’ve scrolled down further earlier and seen the “Mercury – Big picture Kuiper crater image” post the BA recently added here rather than typing that line first. That’ll learn me. 😉 [/blushes.]

PS. Hey ‘Discover’ overlords – any chance of getting the “Recent Comments” sidebar thingy back? Not that I’d want that again at the expense of editing our posts, mind you, but it was kinda good to have.

The Family Guy writers, in a fit of rage after hearing about this, kill three small children, and then ask each other, “hey do you remember that time we killed three small children?” and flash back to it in their minds.

Sometimes Futurama was great, I hope the writers improve their batting average. For me, one in three episodes was really funny. The rest, not so much (typed with Zoidberg’s voice in case it doesn’t come across in html).

After the train wreck that was the DVD-movies, am I alone in not WANTING Futurama back? It was a brilliant show but it had its run, if the movies make anything clear it’s that Groenig and company have lost the sense of the show and, worse, completely run out of ideas. I’m saddened at the idea of Futurama becoming another zombie franchise.

@ Alex: If you’re a fan of Futurama, you DEFINITELY need to watch the last movie…it really is fantastic…although I don’t think the end will have the same punch now that we know its not the last of futurama.

However, personally I couldn’t be glader. Though as above states they seem a little stretched for ideas, I still have complete confidence that Groening can pull it off

Honestly…although it comes to us with a face of simplicity and comedic value…Futurama is one of the few show’s I’ve ever seen tackle the complexities of concepts like existentialism, the future of our race…and no other show has done it with such finesse, humor and beauty. I love futurama

Agreed. There were some really great and funny moments on Futurama, but overall, it wasn’t all that. The show kind of got lost in itself and the gags lost speed after the characters were fully developed. The writers seemed to embrace them too much and I think Groening backed away from the project because he had other fish to fry.

We’ve failed to uphold Brannigan’s Law, however I did make it with a hot alien babe, and in the end is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars? Phil, I’m asking you a question!

To all those poo-pooing the movies, I think, fundamentally, the problem is, like the Simpson’s, Futurama just doesn’t work in a feature-length format. When limited to 20 minutes, the writers are forced to keep the scripts nice and tight (I mean, let’s face it, the movies had their fair share of filler moments and misplaced gags).

As such, I’m keeping my hopes up… and crossing my fingers that it doesn’t go the way of The Simpsons (seasons 9 and on of the Simpsons are much like the Matrix sequels in my mind… in that I refuse to admit they ever happened).

To all the other brown coats out there, have Y’All noticed, the Firefly actors are mostly otherwise occupied and I for one prefer a new story, with new great actors. Firefly was excellent because it extrapolated a reasonable future. What I’d like Joss to do is extrapolate a solar system wide, wild west, anarchy vs authority civilization, in which Earth is the richest customer of Sol system energy and resources, but everybody living/working in space is trying to make their own little colony and get rich,,,I’d include meds for eliminating bone/muscle deterioration, so people could survive indefinitely in free fall on/in small, inhabited rocks, big spinning colonies with their authoritarian rulers(and the chance to zing them). That would eliminate one of my biggest gripes with space opera, the FTL tech. I think it was Asimov who pointed out that governing a multi solar system civilization, even with FTL, was ridiculous. Even successfully doing that in a single sol sys, w/o FTL would be unlikely. Inclusion of some of the potential launch tech we’re trying to develop today, such as mag launchers, laser launchers, Space tethers and elevators and some craft powered by Polywell fusion(or some variation thereof) could be so much fun .

“To all those poo-pooing the movies, I think, fundamentally, the problem is, like the Simpson’s, Futurama just doesn’t work in a feature-length format. When limited to 20 minutes, the writers are forced to keep the scripts nice and tight (I mean, let’s face it, the movies had their fair share of filler moments and misplaced gags).”

This. I’m sure they could screw the new series up, but short episodes are just a much better format for this sort of thing so there’s every reason to believe they’ll be better than the movies. And as for the original series itself, I though it just got better and better as it went along.

“Agreed. There were some really great and funny moments on Futurama, but overall, it wasn’t all that. The show kind of got lost in itself and the gags lost speed after the characters were fully developed.”

If you don’t develop the characters your show become stale, like the Simpsons did a long time ago and like Family Guy did in episode three or so. Both shows are still funny quite often, but they’re not good shows.

“The writers seemed to embrace them too much and I think Groening backed away from the project because he had other fish to fry.”

Good. To get a sense of Matt Groening’s sense of humor, watch the Tracy Ullman Show version of the Simpsons, where he didn’t have a giant staff of clever writers working on it. Go read Life is Hell.

If anyone is the reason for Futurama being as good as it is, I’d say it’s David X. Cohen and Billy West/Maurice LaMarche’s voice.

I think the best episode of all, the one I love to watch, over and over and over… is “The Farnsworth Paradox” where the Prof. accidentally creates a cardboard box with an alternate universe in it… and they, in turn, have a cardboard box with OUR universe in it… By the episode’s end, they’ve thrown more high concepts at you than a philosophy class sponsored by Cheech and Chong.

I LOVE Futurama! I watch the episodes over and over again without getting tired of them. I always keep wishing there’d be more. I hope they continue some of the story lines in the old ones (like what Nibbler meant in “The Why of Fry” when he said Leela was “the other”). I think the writers should watch their old episodes again; there’s so much good stuff, even if they just build on the material they’ve used. I’m so happy they’re coming back.

Speaking of the last DVD movie. Has anyone ever figured out the secret message in the coordinates of the Violet dwarf star? They make a reference to it in the commentary and it’s also mentioned on the wikipedia page. They are 167.84, -58.03, mark 948. I looked em up on a star chart, but didn’t see anything especially obvious and I have no idea what 948 is about. Ooh. I just had a thought. I should look in the bible. Mark 9-48. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, or knows, post it. All glory, yadda yadda…

Phil, you’ve been suggested as ‘science consultant’ in the comments about a SyFy (heard about the name change?) miniseries: Impact (guess what it’s about). Ironically, the title of the article is: Natasha Henstridge says this real science is behind ABC’s disaster mini Impact

That’s fantastic. I’ve loved Futurama since I was a kid, the episode with Fry’s Dog and the Clover are some of the most saddest things I’ve ever seen. Oh, and hey Phil, your website is fantasti-ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.